Divine Animal by Brandon Wint
Divine Animal is the debut poetry book by celebrated, Ontario-born poet and spoken word performer Brandon Wint. The collection is an elegant, expansive mapping of Brandon Wint's relationship to the legacy and wake of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade, as one of its living, Black descendants. The Atlantic ocean is figured as both a historical site and diasporic metaphor from which to explore the complex journeys and negotiations that brought his family to Canada from Jamaica and Barbados.
Divine Animal reckons with the ways the logic of colonialism has brought humankind into an era of ecological devastation, climate change catastrophe and eco-grief. In this way, Brandon Wint offers a thoughtful, empathetic poetics that seeks to re-connect the human world with the natural world. Above all, Divine Animal is a work that lives powerfully at the intersection of celebration and grief. These poems testify to the realities of beauty on Earth, while casting a necessary eye upon the human proclivity to invent sophisticated, resilient modes of violence and inequity.
